The Snake Stone

by Jason Goodwin

  “I don’t know.”

  The ambassador clicked his tongue. “I find the situation curious. A report will have to be prepared, naturally. Under the circumstances, however, I do not think that your attendance in this matter will be required. I would prefer to pursue it with the authorities by—other channels.”

  Yashim could not remember the last time he had blushed. He stood up and bowed with what dignity he could muster, but once out the courtyard he reeled aside and put a hand to the wall.

  So much had been going through his mind that he had simply forgotten the principal rule of his profession, if it was a profession: to try to think like the other man. The ambassador’s insinuation was not, he recognized, so very absurd. A curious situation, indeed: in similar circumstances, he would perhaps have made the same inference. Yashim, liaison to the French ambassador! Well, he could forget that possibility now. He hunched his shoulders and stepped out into the street. A few yards farther on, he came across a patch of sand strewn across the cobbles. Yashim stood silently, looking all around, half hoping to see something that the watchmen had overlooked in the dark.

  A report will have to be prepared.

  The ambassador’s report changed everything for him. His duty to the shade of the dead man had been a private matter—but it was taking on a more terrible, public urgency. He knew what the report would contain: details of a bizarre act of savagery committed on a French national in the streets of Pera; reference to the mystery of Lefèvre’s final days, and to a ship that had already sailed. And at the heart of the whole mystery, of course, something not quite right about Yashim himself. Something uncertain about the role he had played: Yashim and the ship; Yashim and his curious acquaintance with the dead man; Yashim, the last man to see Lefèvre alive. What lay between him and the dead man would become the source of whispers, rumors, innuendo.

  The sultan’s vast household was riven with cliques and cabals; at the palace your choice of friends decided who your enemies would be, too. Yashim had been the confidential eunuch. The sultan’s own discreet problem solver. But the sultan was dying; and not everyone in the palace had reason to appreciate Yashim’s efforts.

  They wouldn’t need to say that he had killed Lefèvre. All that mattered was the cloud of uncertainty—the dust raised by the French ambassador’s report. The shake of a head, a fluttering of hands, a frown: those would be enough to damn him.

  Powerful friends would drop him in a blink. Not a matter of choice, but of survival. People who had depended on him—just the way Lefèvre had done—would need a new protector.

  At the back of Yashim’s mind lay the thought that Palewski had run him into a trap. He did not encourage the thought; but he allowed it to relieve him a little of the wretchedness he felt.

  Yashim put his hand to his head. He’d been too slow: too slow to save a life, too slow to rescue his own reputation; now Palewski’s blundering had cost him his room for maneuver.

  How long would the ambassador need to make his report? A few days, at most. A few days, then, was all he had. To find the killers, and to save himself.

  31

  THE French ambassador didn’t care about evidence all that much. A man had been killed, a Frenchman of little account; it was his duty as magistrate to make a report to the proper authorities in Istanbul. Perhaps the Ottoman gentleman, Palewski’s friend, knew more than he said; perhaps he was even responsible. Pera was getting more dangerous every day: there it was. One should take more care.

  So the ambassador did not pause to reflect, as Yashim did, that his summary had been out of step with the truth. Lefèvre, the captain, and Yashim: all three had known in advance where Lefèvre was to be found that night. But anyone able to examine the ship’s manifest would have known as well, and the boatmen on the caïques, who saw him leave.

  Yashim settled into the bottom of a caïque. The boatman shoved off with a flick of his long oar.

  “Where to, efendi?”

  “Fener Kapi,” Yashim said. The Fener landing stage. The boatman nodded: he was a Greek, and Greeks liked going to Fener.

  For hundreds of years Fener had been the seat of the Orthodox Patriarchate, the soul of Greek Istanbul. In a city where many races and faiths mingled, the Patriarch was a link to the centuries before the Ottoman Conquest, when Constantinople stood at the hub of the Christian world. For a thousand years, decked in the insignia of the church, Byzantine emperors had borne themselves proudly as God’s anointed rulers on earth, greater than popes or patriarchs, wrapped in an unceasing round of prayer and ostentation—interrupted only by usurpation, betrayal, violent death, palace coups, murders, and the vicious political maneuvering favored by tyrants everywhere.

  Worn steps led up to a battered door that had seen much since the last emperor of Byzantium vanished in his purple buskins as Ottoman troops swarmed across the walls of his desolate city. Behind that door lay the central piece in the elaborate mosaic of the Orthodox faith, which spread from the deserts of Mesopotamia and the roadsteads of the Aegean, to the mountains of the Balkans and along the basalt cliffs of the Black Sea; all that was really left of the might and glory of the second Rome, the city of Constantine and Justinian, all that had survived the battle of iconoclasts and iconodules, the treachery of the Latins and the warlike prowess of the Turks.

  Yashim gazed at the great door, then stepped along the street to a smaller gateway, which for the last seventeen years had served as the main entrance to the Patriarchate. The great gate had been sealed as a mark of respect toward the Patriarch Bartholomew, hanged from its lintel by the sultan’s order during the Greek riots of 1821.

  At the gate, he asked for the archimandrite.

  Grigor was in his private office: a fat man with a big beard in a black surtout.

  “Yashim—the angel!” Grigor opened his arms wide across a desk piled with packets and papers done up in purple ribbon.

  The angel was Grigor’s little joke, not one that Yashim particularly shared. As Grigor had once explained, Byzantine iconography represented angels as eunuchs. Angels stood on the threshold between men and God; eunuchs, between men—and women. Both were intermediaries, dedicated to serve.

  “You look well, Grigor,” Yashim said.

  “I am fat and ugly, and you know it, Yashim. But we are, fortunately, all one in the sight of God.”

  Many years ago, he and Yashim had worked for the same master, the Phanariot princely family of the Ypsilanti. Grigor, a couple of years older, had made a point of sneering at Yashim’s provincialism, sending him on fool’s errands, and tormenting him with salacious details of his conquests. It was the obscene stories, above all, which had caught Yashim on the raw.

  One day Grigor had gone too far. Yashim had folded back his sleeves and they had fought together through kitchen and courtyard. “About time someone taught that little snot a lesson,” the head groom had said as he marched Yashim upstairs to face Ypsilanti.

  But after that, they had understood each other. They had even become, in a way, friends. When the Patriarch was hanged and riots exploded in the streets, Yashim had helped Grigor to escape the city.

  “You will take a coffee with us?” Grigor rang a bell. “The school is flourishing,” he added.

  “I am glad.” There had been a difficulty, two years before, over plans to expand the Greek boys’ school, and Yashim had helped to smooth it over.

  They talked for a few minutes, drinking their coffee, skirting around delicate subjects. Eventually the priest returned his empty cup to the saucer.

  “It is good to see you. To talk again.”

  Yashim took a breath. “You’ve heard the rumors about the sultan?”

  Grigor leaned his chin into his beard. “He is very ill.”

  “So I understand. It would be an old man who could remember the last time a sultan died this way. Selim was murdered at Topkapi.”

  “And Mahmut was just a child. Of course. Now he has reigned for a long time.”

  “Reigned, but not
ruled. He was under the control of the Janissaries, his own army, for almost twenty years.”

  Grigor frowned. “So he should not be held to account for what happened before he destroyed the Janissaries? The murder of the Patriarch Bartholomew cannot be laid at his door?”

  Yashim decided to let this pass. “There’s a mood in the city I’ve never known before, Grigor. Look at the money. The sultan is slowly dying, and the people are afraid of the money. Its value is sinking every day.”

  “I am a priest, not a banker.”

  Yashim turned his head and gazed out of the window.

  “I meant it as an example,” he said slowly. “In former times, the death of a sultan stopped the clocks. Only the son who could buy off the Janissaries, take control of the treasury, and win the backing of the holy men succeeded to his place.”

  “A barbaric arrangement,” Grigor said.

  Yashim pressed on. “When the Janissaries killed Selim, they took power before anyone could react. But Mahmut’s illness casts a shadow over Istanbul.”

  Grigor sighed. “All those years ago, when you helped me get away from here, I wandered among the monasteries of Bulgaria. My life changed. And I came back. Do you know why?”

  “To join the church,” Yashim said.

  “To join the church,” Grigor echoed, with a nod. “Of course.” He paused. “I came back, Yashim efendi, because this is my city. We Greeks do not govern it, I admit. But it governs us. For me, this city is not a reminder of what we were. A city of art? Paff! The place where we triumphed for a millennium—over barbarians, over the pope in Rome, over all our enemies—until the last one?”

  He pursed his lips, a thoughtful look on his face. “We do not seek battles. Our concern is with the spirit and the mystery of life. Who rules is of no consequence to us. We obeyed an emperor. We obey a sultan. This is the order ordained by God, in the material world, and the Redeemer instructed us to make our peace with that order. Render to Caesar what belongs to Caesar, and to God what belongs to God. This is the Bible.”

  Yashim inclined his head politely.

  “Indeed,” Grigor continued, “before the Turkish Conquest we had a saying: better the sultan’s turban than the bishop’s miter. Anything but the pope in Rome. You Turks are merely the caretakers of our Constantinople.”

  He leaned forward, his long beard brushing against the top of his desk. “It is Greek because its people are Greek. Because it is the scene of our triumphs—and all our trials, too.”

  He jabbed the air with a plump finger.

  “In this city the Greek faithful have experienced their deepest humiliations. The loss of western Christendom—Rome, Ravenna, all that—ended with the Great Schism with the pope, right here in the church of the Holy Wisdom, Aya Sofia. Then came the sack of the city by the crusaders, in 1204: for sixty years we endured the rule of heretics. The fall of the city in 1453, and the death of the emperor at its walls. Quite a catalog. We have suffered the loss of our churches, the rages of the mobs, the murder of our Patriarch—ah, yes, we have bought this city with our blood, and we survive. Constantinople is—I say it without blasphemy—our Golgotha.”

  He held up his hands, fingers outspread. “Now, perhaps, you understand what I mean.”

  Yashim sat very still. He was impressed.

  But he had come for something else.

  “Tell me about the Hetira, Grigor.”

  A shadow slid across the archimandrite’s face. “I don’t know who they are: a many-headed Hydra, possibly. They have nothing to do with us here—but yes, their aims have a certain currency in some circles of the church. And beyond that, in the kingdom of Greece.”

  A low bell sounded from far away. Grigor got to his feet and opened a cupboard. Inside hung his vestments.

  “I officiate at mass,” he explained.

  “I think they frighten people, Grigor,” Yashim said.

  Grigor put his arms through his robes, one by one, and said nothing. He did not look around.

  “I think there is something they kill to possess,” Yashim continued. “Or to protect. Some—I don’t know—some object, or some kind of knowledge. I think that when anyone gets too close, they react.”

  “I see.” There was a look of scorn on Grigor’s face. “And you, angel, are you not afraid for yourself?”

  “I am afraid only of my ignorance,” Yashim replied carefully. “I am afraid of the enemy I don’t know.”

  The priest reached carelessly for a book on the shelf beside him.

  “Your enemy is an idea. Greeks call it the Great Idea. For the time it takes to say a mass, you may look at this. After that, the book does not exist.” He laid the cope across his shoulders and turned to Yashim. “The church has no part in this affair of yours.”

  They stared at each other, the eunuch and the priest. Then Grigor was gone, and Yashim was left alone, clutching the book in both hands.

  32

  FOR the time it takes to say a mass. Yashim sat down. The book was written—assembled was a better word—by a Dr. Stephanitzes, late physician-in-ordinary to the Greek army of independence. It had been recently published in Athens, the capital of independent Greece. The paper was cheap; the gold-blocked title on the cover was blurred around the edges.

  Yashim had never come across such a book before—a wild flinging together of prophecy, prejudice, false premise, and circular argument. It preached a story that began with the collapse of Byzantine power in 1453 and wound its way, over hundreds of pages and many false starts and irrelevant asides, to its eventual restoration under its last emperor, miraculously reborn.

  Yashim discovered the oracles of an ancient patriarch, Tarasios, and of Leo the Wise; the prognostications of Methodios of Patara; the curiously prophetic epitaph on the tomb of Constantine the Great, who had founded the city fifteen hundred years before; all of them twisted and sugared up by the visions of one Agathangelos, who foresaw the city liberated by a great phalanx of blond northern giants, while the Turks themselves were to be chased away beyond the Red Apple Tree.

  This, then, was the Great Idea. A farrago of blasphemies and wishful thinking—but heady stuff, Yashim had to admit. Like sticking your nose through the gateway to the Spice Bazaar. If you were a Greek, and you wanted to believe, then here was the sacred text, without a doubt.

  33

  IN the church of St. George, the archimandrite waved the censer again and filled the air with the grateful fragrance of sandalwood and frankincense. He intoned the words of the creed.

  I believe in One God, Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth and of everything visible and invisible, he sang.

  And in One Lord, Jesus Christ, the only-begotten Son of God, begotten of the Father before all ages.

  Light of Light, True God of True God, begotten, not made, consubstantial with the Father, through Whom all things were made.

  He sang the words; his body trembled to the majestic statement of faith; but his mind was elsewhere. Had he, he wondered, already said too much?

  I acknowledge one baptism for the forgiveness of sins.

  And then there was the book. The Ottoman authorities probably didn’t know that it existed. It was better that way.

  I await the resurrection of the dead.

  And the life of the ages to come.

  That was the way it should be kept.

  Amen.

  34

  YASHIM made his way into the Grand Bazaar. It was two days since Goulandris the bookseller had been killed, and still confidence had not returned: locked doors punctuated the frothy rows of booths, the vendors seemed subdued, the crowd less busy than usual.

  Malakian was at his doorway, sitting quietly on a mat with his hands in his lap.

  “Do you have news?”

  Yashim inclined his head. “Lefèvre, the Frenchman we talked about? He was killed in Pera.”

  Malakian sighed. “It is like I said. Lefèvre lived a dangerous life.”

  “That’s not quite what you said, Malakia
n efendi. You said he did not always dig with a spade.”

  “It is the same, my friend. In Istanbul, I think, it is better that the ground is not disturbed.”

  “Lefèvre disturbed something.” Yashim squatted down beside the old man. “Or someone.”

  “You will have a coffee with me,” Malakian said.

  Yashim could tell he didn’t mean it. He declined. “The Hetira, efendi.”

  The old Armenian paused before replying. “I think a man like Lefèvre would work where money is to be found. But sometimes in these places there are too many secrets, also, and so there is no trust. A negotiation is not easy. I am sorry for his children.”

  “His children?” Yashim found it hard to imagine a Lefèvre with children. But then, what would he know? “Do you have children, Malakian efendi?”

  The old man nodded solemnly. “Five,” he said.

  “God’s blessing upon them,” Yashim said politely. “Malakian efendi, do you still have that coin for Dr. Millingen? The English collector?”

  It was Malakian who looked surprised. “Of course. He does not come here every day.”

  “I will be in Pera this afternoon,” Yashim said. “I could take him the coin, if you liked.”

  Malakian turned his head to look at Yashim. “You want to meet Dr. Millingen?”

  “Yes,” Yashim said.

  35

  “MY French is—indifferent, I’m afraid,” said Millingen. He laughed pleasantly and held out a hand. Yashim took it: the doctor had a firm grip. Scarcely older than Yashim, he looked in good shape: the grizzled hair, the lean, brown face, the tall, erect posture. He was neatly dressed in a black cutaway coat and a brilliant white shirt; his cravat was loose at the neck.